IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing business processes > Work with business vocabularies
Aliases
An alias is created as part of a business item in a business vocabulary. An alias is a descriptive and business-friendly name for a field in a business object or WSDL message.
Business items are based on business objects and WSDL messages which can have complex data structures. Defining aliases allows you to pull out specific fields of those underlying structures and provide simple representations within the business item. If you need a certain field to be visible as an attribute of a business item when viewed in WebSphere Business Compass, you must define an alias for that field.
An alias is a descriptive name that refers to the value returned by an XPath expression. Instead of referring to the specific XPath, you can simply refer to the alias.
For example, you can assign a simple alias like "Zip" to represent the XPath expression /Customer/address/zipcode.
You can also use an alias that you have created for a business item in a business vocabulary when you build an XPath expression in other IBM Integration Designer editors, such as in the BPEL process editor.
An alias can refer to an XPath expression that returns any of the following data types:
- boolean
- date
- float
- integer
- string
- business items
Related concepts:
Business items
Related tasks:
Create a business vocabulary